Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.

Examining the crucial relationship between sexuality, race, and class, Beyond the Politics of the Closet highlights the impact gay rights politics and activism have had on the wider American political landscape since the rights revolutions of the 1960s.

How did we come to endanger the very future of life on Earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? Laid Waste! answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American culture of exploitation that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this came to be.

From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.

William H. Meyer defines global governance as the management of global issues within a political space that has no single centralized authority. Employing a combination of historical, quantitative, normative, and policy analyses, he presents a series of case studies at the intersection of power politics and international justice.

In Beyond the New Deal Order, contributors bring fresh perspectives to the historic meaning and significance of the New Deal coalition from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century. The volume asks if a new order will emerge from the economic, ideological, institutional, and electoral currents shaping politics today.

Living Tangier examines African migration to Europe and European migration to Africa, focusing on the dynamics of migration in terms of race and legal standing in Tangier, a Moroccan city at the intersection of Africa and Europe. Based on extensive ethnographic work, it explores how migrants experience and affect the city.

Michael Davis explores the "musical" quality of thinking in the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato, revealing the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's prerational foundations.

The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination.

Examining how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, Captives of Liberty reveals a cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge that spiraled out of control, transforming a struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

Bonds of Secrecy illuminates the relationship between human experiences of secrecy and early medieval beliefs about divine omniscience. Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this relationship was fundamental to early English legal and monastic culture and profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in the Middle Ages.

In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker argues that rhetoric and theology establish blackness and whiteness as metaphors for sin and purity in medieval English and European writing. Whitaker shows how these metaphors came to guide the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics.